Monday, January 17, 2011

20 Mass Shootings a Year

I went to China a few years ago, and as we drove from the airport to the hotel we passed through a seedy-looking neighborhood. People were standing on street corners, the buildings were dirty, and I asked my translator if it was safe to go there. "It's safe," he said. "There are no guns here. You want to watch for pickpockets, but guns are against the law."

Many of us grew up in a world that believed that "If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns," and it had never occurred to me that you could really have a situation where the outlaws did not in fact have guns, because they were outlawed. It is a constant force in American life, we know that at any moment somebody can pull out a gun. Cut somebody off in traffic and they might shoot you, bump into someone accidentally on the street and it might cost you your life. You don't worry that they will punch you or tackle you or even stab you though that might happen, too, you worry that they will shoot you.

USA Today had a piece recently that looked into the situation a bit. The story contained this interesting paragraph:

Notwithstanding changes over the years in regulations pertaining to background checks for gun purchasers, the temporary requirement for waiting periods, the passage and subsequence expiration of the assault weapons ban, and the spread of concealed carry laws, the number of mass shootings in the United States — averaging 20 per year — has remained relatively stable over decades. Mass shootings are a fact of American life

Arizona has some of the most liberal gun laws in the country. It's easier to understand if you live there. The desert is a wide open place, there are millions of acres of land where you can fire a gun and nobody will be hurt. There's lots of hunting, and yes it is the land of cowboys and Western justice, when you live on a ranch miles from your nearest neighbor you are responsible for your own protection. The people in the cities, Phoenix and Tucson, don't have quite that justification, but the attitude is pervasive from Tucson to Tucumcari and throughout the Southwest.

I have sat with earnest European professors who have asked me, seriously, why do Americans shoot each other so much? And I have tried to explain to them about the Second Amendment and the fact that no matter what you think makes sense, Americans are not going to give up their right to bear arms. They cannot understand it, it is a uniquely American tradition that makes no sense unless you accept the perhaps paranoiac vision of tyrannical government coming into your neighborhood to attack your home and family. And that vision disintegrates under scrutiny -- why would the government come into your neighborhood? It goes back to the day when colonists were forced to house British soldiers, but, really, that's not going to happen now. We love our guns because we love our guns, it has become circular and there is no way for the Ouroboros to swallow its own tail and no way to make it spit it out.

Although gun proponents are correct when they contend that firearms are not to blame for the behavior of mass killers, guns do make their attacks far bloodier. The availability of high-powered, rapid-fire weapons is surely a large part of the reason why the death tolls in mass murders have been so large in the recent past. Three-quarters of the deadliest mass murders in the United States have occurred since 1980, most of which involved firearms as the exclusive or primary weapon.

You might not have caught this little aside by Rachel Maddow on her January 11th show:

Laws about guns are one of the few things in the world that is ungoogleable. And all the things that all of us who work on the show research all day long, every day, in all of the days that we work on this show, there is a tiny handful of topics you can't do your research about on google. All the other ones are about something related to sex, or something that might seem like it might be related to sex when you type it into the google search engine.

But laws about guns, that is the one thing that has nothing to do about sex that you can't get any useful information about by googling, because the gun lobby so completely dominates the debate. You have to do your own independent research about this in the library and books. You will not find trustworthy, unbiased information about this online, I'm telling you.

But in 2004 when the assault weapons ban was allowed to expire, one of the things that expired with it was a ban on high-capacity magazines for handguns. It is a dog bites man story. It is behind a political cliche to note how powerful the gun lobby is in america. How much they dominate what's even allowed to be debated about guns. Transcript

So powerful they can tell Google to hide the information about how dangerous guns are.

The country needs to have an honest debate about gun safety. You will never take away the people's right to own guns for self-protection and for hunting, but every thinking person understands that the world is not safer when a random self-selected subset of the population is carrying firearms.

This is the point at which you share your opinion. It's called an honest discussion.

As to what we should do, I'm not sure. I know it's a problem. I would also postulate that extreme anti-gun-control positions don't help.

I know it's easier to buy a semi-automatic than to get a pilot's license. Maybe some of the thinking that goes into limiting licenses should go into limiting gun purchases.

The position that all gun purchases should be allowed under all circumstances, but that all people who are potentially unbalanced should be locked up (which anonymous espoused on an earlier thread), is so un-American and unreasonable as to be dismissed summarily.

"come up with an idea and we'll have an honest discussion about how stupid it is"

That's a wonderful example of "the kettle calling the pot black", "Anonymous". But then, you have an amazing propensity for relying on dishonest blather in your posts, so we all know where you are coming from.

Honey, where do you come up with this stuff? Have you ever met gay people?

Actually I do feel sort of hypocritical calling you a troll. Sometimes you seem to actually interact appropriately with people. But you do seem to see this sight as a place where you get away with putting down queer people with impunity. Whatever makes you happy (De gustibus non disputandum est).

I'm not so much a dork as a geek. for example, see joke below:

Why do fish perish when Latin goes bad?

Because Carp Die.

See what I mean?

The topic of gun purchases is important. It's a shame you squelched discussion.

You missed the (I suppose too subtle) implications of what I was saying (perhaps I said some of it on another thread).

A suggestions is that we have the same sort of medical record checks and psychiatric examinations for gun purchses that we have for pilot's licenses. I think the burden should be on people who want to buy weapons to prove that they are sane enough to handle them.

Again, this is a nascent idea and a starting point for discussion.

In discussions, people exchange ideas and develop them. In debates, people state opinions and try to score points off of one another. In banter, friends exaggerate one another's faults in a teasing way. In verbal exchanges, people say insulting things to people they don't like.

Jim suggested a discussion. That's what I'm up for. I have little interest in the game of forensics, I think it's silly in this context.